Emmanuelle Largeteau, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and John Gillis, Trinity College Dublin

Conserving a 17th-century manuscript damaged by mould at Trinity College Dublin

Part of a conservator’s work in a library is to help keep the collection accessible. To achieve this goal, books must be stable enough to be handled safely by staff and readers. When a book is too fragile to be circulated, the conservator can step in.

During my conservation internship at Trinity College, I had the opportunity to work on a challenging project: the manuscript MS 1801. Dated around 1600, the text gathers 4 different religious texts: Answer to the jesuits’ N.T. ; Cavendish’s life of Wosley ; Rathramus de nativitate christi and Examination of an answer sent from the new separation within this city.

Inaccessible to readers for many years, part of the manuscript was heavily damaged by mould. The paper was extremely weak, brittle, soft and discoloured. Tears, holes and losses were visible on almost every page. In addition, the mould contamination also created a large array of coloured stains on the text block. The book was in such a poor condition that it was not possible to handle without damaging it further.

The main objectives of the conservation treatment were to stabilise the book to avoid the degradation to progress and to make it an accessible part of the library collection.

This paper will present the practical solutions found to meet these objectives. The text block conservation will be presented first: how the paper was strengthened and how the tears and the holes were mended. In the second part, the details of the new binding made for the manuscript will be described.

To fragile to be handled, the text block first had to be surface cleaned and reinforced. Specific focus will be placed on the difficulties and the issues of treating paper heavily damaged by mould, in particular, on how the paper support was reinforced while keeping the text legible. I will demonstrate how the choice of remoistenable tissue, and the way it was used, helped return the manuscript to an accessible condition. The preparation and the application of the remoistenable tissue will be addressed.

To complete this presentation, I will also describe the treatment of MS 7502, a second manuscript with similar damages, conserved at Trinity College. The choice of the paper and the adhesive for the remoistenable tissue and how it was applied, will be discussed.

After reinforcement and repairs, the folios were rebound. The new binding structure had to meet two principal goals: to protect the conserved text block and to make the volume easily usable by readers and staff. An elaborated binding structure was chosen. All the gatherings were mounted on new guards to avoid further damaging the spine of the original gatherings during the rounding and the backing of the text block.

The sewing, rounding and backing was then done on these new guards. This structure also allows for the easy opening of each gathering and avoids having text hidden in the inner joint. The cover and its attachment will also be described.

With this paper, I am hoping to show that conserving the materials of this manuscript also resulted in re-instating the functionality of the book, now re-integrated into the library collection – once again accessible for all.